The Review of Contemporary Fiction

My Education: A Book of Dreams by William S. Burroughs
David Seed

William S. Burroughs. My Education: A Book of Dreams. Picador, 1996. 193 pp. £6.99.

My Education assembles descriptions of Burroughs’s dreams sometimes dating as far back as the 1970s. It is a volume that contains some of the raw material used in his novels, but Burroughs also includes brief commentaries on the status of dreams. On the one hand, he rejects the Freudian view of there being a clear continuity between the waking and dreaming life of the individual; on the other, he rejects the dismissive view of dreams as “neural housecleaning.” Defending the importance of dreams amounts to defending the importance of his own fiction for Burroughs, and their apparent randomness and unpredictability carry anarchic value for him in disrupting the orderliness of contemporary life. Burroughs reflects ironically on Kerouac’s romantic confidence that dreams could give access to psychic depth and tends instead to go for paranoid evocations of forces or meanings just out of the observer’s reach. One fragment describes himself asleep under a drape and being visited by a black dog symbolic of death. Many of the pieces gathered here are haunted by death, but in this instance Burroughs cannot pin down the identity of the other (dead?) human presence in the dream. In another example Burroughs figures himself as disoriented in a subway station while a man “with very pale gray eyes” sitting at a nearby table suggests: “Mr Burroughs, why don’t you call

6410?” The reader is denied any space to wonder how the speaker knows Burroughs’s name and is led to infer that the number might signify a room in the hotel mentioned at the end of the fragment. Typically these dreams imply larger autobiographical or cultural narratives that are never made clear. Instead the reader is given glimpses of Burroughs’s friends and associates, his reading of novelists like Conrad, and, of course, snapshot views of gay sexual experiences (usually summarized very tersely as “making it”). The sheer number of references in these dreams to other fiction implies a self-consciousness to the volume. Although its title suggests learning and apprentice-work, My Education is really a retrospective on Burroughs’s own output, with many interesting comments on, for instance, his method of abruptly shifting context so that no individual version of the real can ever quite gell. In one piece the description of a pension is informed by a confidence that it is situated in Tangier but the dreamer is shocked to discover that the outside view belies this assumption. And this process is constantly being repeated in the dreams as in Burroughs’s fiction. Place and person shift abruptly with surreal consequences, and Burroughs repeatedly designates these experiences as taking place in the “Land of the Dead.” For all these reasons, My Education makes a surprisingly accessible companion to Burroughs’s published fiction. [David Seed]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction My Education: A Book of Dreams by William S. Burroughs David Seed William S. Burroughs. My Education: A Book of Dreams. Picador, 1996. 193 pp. £6.99. My Education assembles descriptions of Burroughs’s dreams sometimes dating as far back as the 1970s. It is a volume that contains some of the raw material used in his novels, but Burroughs also includes brief commentaries on the status of dreams. On the one hand, he rejects the Freudian view of there being a clear continuity between the waking and dreaming life of the individual; on the other, he rejects the dismissive view of dreams as “neural housecleaning.” Defending the importance of dreams amounts to defending the importance of his own fiction for Burroughs, and their apparent randomness and unpredictability carry anarchic value for him in disrupting the orderliness of contemporary life. Burroughs reflects ironically on Kerouac’s romantic confidence that dreams could give access to psychic depth and tends instead to go for paranoid evocations of forces or meanings just out of the observer’s reach. One fragment describes himself asleep under a drape and being visited by a black dog symbolic of death. Many of the pieces gathered here are haunted by death, but in this instance Burroughs cannot pin down the identity of the other (dead?) human presence in the dream. In another example Burroughs figures himself as disoriented in a subway station while a man “with very pale gray eyes” sitting at a nearby table suggests: “Mr Burroughs, why don’t you call 6410?” The reader is denied any space to wonder how the speaker knows Burroughs’s name and is led to infer that the number might signify a room in the hotel mentioned at the end of the fragment. Typically these dreams imply larger autobiographical or cultural narratives that are never made clear. Instead the reader is given glimpses of Burroughs’s friends and associates, his reading of novelists like Conrad, and, of course, snapshot views of gay sexual experiences (usually summarized very tersely as “making it”). The sheer number of references in these dreams to other fiction implies a self-consciousness to the volume. Although its title suggests learning and apprentice-work, My Education is really a retrospective on Burroughs’s own output, with many interesting comments on, for instance, his method of abruptly shifting context so that no individual version of the real can ever quite gell. In one piece the description of a pension is informed by a confidence that it is situated in Tangier but the dreamer is shocked to discover that the outside view belies this assumption. And this process is constantly being repeated in the dreams as in Burroughs’s fiction. Place and person shift abruptly with surreal consequences, and Burroughs repeatedly designates these experiences as taking place in the “Land of the Dead.” For all these reasons, My Education makes a surprisingly accessible companion to Burroughs’s published fiction. [David Seed]

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